Yesterday I mentioned that I was going to a physics sing-along. I was one of about 50 people who turned up. Some loiterers in the lobby of the hotel where it was happening tried to warn me off. “It’s like a lecture at the conference,” they said. “They’re using an overhead projector.”
I went anyway. And although I didn’t expect to be saying this, I enjoyed it. I even sang. There were two musicians; one with a guitar, the other a bongo; a singer and a laptop to provide backing music.
So, altogether now, to the tune of Loch Lomond…
“Oh, you be the B field, and I’ll be the E field,
Let’s dance through the cosmos, my lover!
With the ether set aside, you and I can freely glide,
Supported on the wings of each other.”
The next verses weren’t quite so lovely, but I thought that this opening was sublime. It begins a poetic love song, sung by an electric (E) field to a magnetic (B) field, which pays tribute to their partnership in an electromagnetic wave. The rest of the words and a recording of The Love Song of the Electric Field are here.
The lyrics are by Walter Smith, an associate professor in physics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and the coordinator of last night’s event. He runs a website that collects physics songs. Apparently, it was common in the early 1900s for physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge to sing songs, which they had penned themselves, after dinner. More here.
For more funny lyrics from last night’s karaoke session, relating to fraud and Nature, keep reading…
Firstly, thanks to Laura Greene, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She not only wrote the lyrics shown below, she was also at the sing-along to perform the piece, and gave her permission for the text to be posted here.
Fabricate! is a moral song about the fate of a young scientist, Jan Hendrik Schön. He was considered a rising star in physics until it emerged that much of his data had been made up. Nature ran a news story in October 2002 about the investigation into his work, some of which Nature had published. The story is here (password required). Try to have the right tempo in your head as you read the piece. It’s to the tune of Cabaret!…
What good is working alone in your lab
Don’t leave results to fate
Come and just Fabricate, young Schön
Come and just Fabricate
No use permitting truth dictate your doom
Or wipe all your fame way
Come and just Fabricate, young Schön
Come and just Fabricate.
I knew a Prof with honesty and stature
Worked day and night but never got in Nature
She wasn’t what you’d call a CV power
With no Science pubs, her salary soon went sour.
When she lost her grants the big-shots came to snicker
“Well, compared to Schön, the NSF won’t pick her”
But when we heard of young Schön’s evil deeds
She was the happiest Prof, you’d ever seen
Put down the flanges, the scopes and the probes
Don’t make the journals wait
Come and just Fabricate, young Schön
Come and just Fabricate
Come fudge the lines
Draw points by hand
Get Nature pubs, start celebrating
Right this way, your Nobel’s waiting
And as for me, and as for me,
I made my mind up, with Science and Nature
To publish there, does not raise stature
Start by admitting inventing the points
Isn’t worth accolades
You lose when you Fabricate, young Schön
You lose when you Fabricate, young Schön
And we all lose, when you Fabricate!